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-   -   Portable Nintendo 64 (https://www.miataturbo.net/insert-bs-here-4/portable-nintendo-64-a-59204/)

pdexta 07-18-2011 10:04 PM

Portable Nintendo 64
 
Saw this on another forum and thought you guys would appreciate it. The forum is in spanish, so I have no idea what they're saying, but the pictures are awesome.

http://www.inventosunicos.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=14

9671111 07-18-2011 10:14 PM

*

Joe Perez 07-18-2011 10:19 PM

Pretty amazing what you can do with a little Bondo and a lot of spare time.

Ben Heck would approve.

NA6C-Guy 07-18-2011 10:22 PM

Fucking awesome! That dude is major pimp! I'd love to pull that out of my backpack sitting next to some 12 year old kids playing on their PSP. "You don't know shit about this, son... 007, GoldenEye, N64"

turotufas 07-18-2011 10:24 PM

GoldenEye :cool:

tasty danish 07-18-2011 10:37 PM

Amazing. One gripe however. The D-pad. Fighting games would be impossible.

FRT_Fun 07-18-2011 10:44 PM

That is pretty amazing.

bayside blue 07-18-2011 11:30 PM

thats awesome!

Joe Perez 07-18-2011 11:45 PM


Originally Posted by NA6C-Guy (Post 750659)
I'd love to pull that out of my backpack sitting next to some 12 year old kids playing on their PSP. "You don't know shit about this, son... 007, GoldenEye, N64"

I am endlessly amused by the idea that an N64 is considered a "vintage" game machine.

Know thy roots:

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...l/PictureX.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...VCSpModel1.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...5/Rev4Pic1.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro.../Rev5Final.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...main%20pic.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...5/GoldMain.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...1/prod51-2.jpg

http://benheck.com/Games/VCS_project..._tech_hero.jpg

http://benheck.com/images/show/xbox_1977.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/VCS_pro...v51/51hero.jpg

http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content...0_portable.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Coleco/Coleco_Main.jpg

http://benheck.com/Games/Atari_7800/7800_hero3.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Nintend...me_running.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Nintend..._cartridge.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Sega_pr...ExodusBack.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Sega_pr...xodusTheen.jpg

Bryce 07-19-2011 01:03 AM

HDMI PORT?! HDMI PORT!?

What?

Cococarbine 07-19-2011 02:07 AM

That is simply amazing. It's no fun playing Goldeneye or SSB by yourself though.


NA6C-Guy 07-19-2011 08:12 AM


Originally Posted by Joe Perez (Post 750695)
I am endlessly amused by the idea that an N64 is considered a "vintage" game machine.

Know thy roots:

Not so much vintage, just old school, and one of the best in my opinion. I remember spending countless hours in my early teens playing some of my favorite games. A lot of kids of 12 or younger will never know the joys of gaming prior to PS2 and XBOX. Fucking rumble pack had to be plugged into the controller!? Madness! :giggle:

Joe Perez 07-19-2011 11:04 AM


Originally Posted by Bryce (Post 750722)
HDMI PORT?! HDMI PORT!?

Drugs are bad, mmkay?




Originally Posted by NA6C-Guy (Post 750772)
Not so much vintage, just old school

Hmm. I can't even accept "old school."

The history of home video game systems breaks down as follows:

1: The pre-microprocessor era, in which game logic was either analog or implemented in discrete logic or non-programmable ASICs. Magnavox Odyssey, Pong (and its many clones) etc.

2: The early microprocessor era, in which ROM-based cartridges came into being and sprites were first introduced, however game logic was still centered around the "player / missile" or "player / ball" concept. Fairchild Channel F, the early Atari machines (VCS, 5200, 7800), ColecoVision, IntelliVision, Vectrex, etc.

3: The Renaissance, in which the industry rose up out of the ashes of the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 and developed advanced graphical capabilities to distinguish themselves from the Commodore 64 and its successors. NES, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16, Super NES, Genesis, NeoGeo, etc.

4: The Age of Enlightenment, in which hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and useless, annoying analog control sticks the size of a gerbil penis became dominant. Saturn, 3D0, Dreamcast, N64, all members of Playstation / Xbox family, GameCube, Wii, etc.

18psi 07-19-2011 11:17 AM

Enlightenment is right: cutting class in 7th grade to get stoned and play goldeneye was liberating:giggle:

kdizzfsho! 07-19-2011 11:44 AM

1 Attachment(s)
Attachment 187410

I couldn't resist :giggle:

Seriously, one of the best things I've ever seen. What craftsmanship!

tasty danish 07-19-2011 11:52 AM


Originally Posted by Joe Perez (Post 750822)
Drugs are bad, mmkay?



Hmm. I can't even accept "old school."

The history of home video game systems breaks down as follows:

1: The pre-microprocessor era, in which game logic was either analog or implemented in discrete logic or non-programmable ASICs. Magnavox Odyssey, Pong (and its many clones) etc.

2: The early microprocessor era, in which ROM-based cartridges came into being and sprites were first introduced, however game logic was still centered around the "player / missile" or "player / ball" concept. Fairchild Channel F, the early Atari machines (VCS, 5200, 7800), ColecoVision, IntelliVision, Vectrex, etc.

3: The Renaissance, in which the industry rose up out of the ashes of the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 and developed advanced graphical capabilities to distinguish themselves from the Commodore 64 and its successors. NES, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16, Super NES, Genesis, NeoGeo, Saturn, etc.

4: The Age of Enlightenment, in which hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and useless, annoying analog control sticks the size of a gerbil penis became dominant. 3D0, Dreamcast, N64, all members of Playstation / Xbox family, GameCube, Wii, etc.

I would argue the logic of separating the Saturn and the N64. Though they were 2 years apart, they were the same generation.

Joe Perez 07-19-2011 12:12 PM


Originally Posted by tasty danish (Post 750844)
I would argue the logic of separating the Saturn and the N64.

You're quite right. I never owned a Saturn (they were after my time) but I'd thought that it only supported bitmap graphics. Did a little research and found out that its graphics engine supported both bitmapped sprites and shaded polygons.

Rather interestingly, the background renderer was its own discrete engine, so this seems to have been sort of a crossover design, where polygons were used, but were conceptually treated as though they were sprites, in that they were separate from the playfield itself.

But it has a 3D rendering engine, so it falls into the Modern Era. (It did not, however, have a gerbil-penis controller as standard equipment- that was optional.)

Post corrected.

icantthink4155 07-19-2011 12:42 PM

Super impress with the fab skills.

Pitlab77 07-19-2011 04:20 PM

I was about to say wait a minute when i saw the 2600 (i had one), but then I saw the coleco(sp)vision later on.

1redcanuck 07-19-2011 04:51 PM

I've seen online a guy that builds current gen. Console laptops. Pretty sweet.http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/x360_page_5.htm

Joe Perez 07-19-2011 05:32 PM

Are you referring to the work of Benjamin J. Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck), who built all of the portable consoles I posted earlier?

http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/eli...e_360_hero.jpg

http://www.benheck.com/Games/Xbox360...jones_left.jpg

viperormiata 07-19-2011 05:59 PM


Originally Posted by Joe Perez (Post 750985)
Are you referring to the work of Benjamin J. Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck)

Ben is amazing. We've exchanged emails a few times when I wanted to build a portable N64

Here are some more options/designs. The first one is done so well it could be sold as a commercial product.






Not the same, but it's cool idea.

tasty danish 07-19-2011 07:36 PM


Originally Posted by Joe Perez (Post 750858)
You're quite right. I never owned a Saturn (they were after my time) but I'd thought that it only supported bitmap graphics. Did a little research and found out that its graphics engine supported both bitmapped sprites and shaded polygons.

Rather interestingly, the background renderer was its own discrete engine, so this seems to have been sort of a crossover design, where polygons were used, but were conceptually treated as though they were sprites, in that they were separate from the playfield itself.

But it has a 3D rendering engine, so it falls into the Modern Era. (It did not, however, have a gerbil-penis controller as standard equipment- that was optional.)

Post corrected.

ROFL COPTER @ gerbil penis. The saturn was indeed a bit of an oddity. I never owned one back in the day, but I picked one up as an antique because it has some hidden GEMS, especially if you mod it to play Japan games.

From what I've read it died out as it was harder to write for then the PS1, though in some respects it was superior (you definitely see FAR more beautiful 2D games on the saturn).

Joe Perez 07-19-2011 08:31 PM

3 Attachment(s)
There have been some real oddball CPU and GPU designs over the years.


A neighbor of mine was, until recently, a lead developer for Rockstar Games. So I hear some interesting stories.

For instance, that the original developer's platform for the XBOX 360, provided to them by Microsoft, was a Mac? Yup. They needed something with a PowerPC processor in it, and the 360 hardware was nowhere close to being ready for the developers, so they bought a bunch of PowerMacs, had ATI spin a modified graphics card for them, wrote some custom firmware, and shipped 'em to the developers.

The poor thing doesn't have a fixed-to-float operand, either. Programmers will understand what a bitch that is.

And coding for the PS3 is apparently just utter hell. The problem comes from having to manage shared resources amongst a seven-core processor. Obviously the opportunities for memory conflicts, stalls, race conditions and whatnot abound. On the plus side, the GPU is apparently so underutilized that they offload most of the game physics onto it.


Of course, the original VCS (Atari 2600) was the grandaddy of weird hardware. I've spent a lot of time studying that machine, as it's quite fascinating. In particular, the book is an excellent volume, though if you're into that sort of thing, I recommend that you start by simply downloading the schematics and looking over them. They're available here:

http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive..._2600_Low.html

The schematics for the actual TIA chip itself are laughably simple by modern standards. You could build one out of discrete parts: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive...tia/index.html

There's also a good design history here: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archive...?SystemID=2600


Did you know that the 2600 had no framebuffer, and for that matter, no video memory of any kind? Today, we take this sort of thing for granted. Just write some data into some location in RAM, and the video hardware will take care of putting it on the screen for you. Not the VCS. Only 128 bytes (not k, but bytes) of RAM, and that was all for the game logic. The CPU itself actually had to draw the screen in real time as the beam moved.

That's why those huge borders are there all around the active display- they provide the CPU with some extra time in which to do all of the actual game logic (fetching input, doing collision detection, updating the sprite table, generating sound, keeping score, reading and writing to memory, etc.) It's also why, if you dig back in your memory, some games occasionally had little black, horizontal lines which encroached into the left edge of the playfield from time to time- lazy programmers put those there as needed to give the CPU just a few extra cycles to finish whatever it was doing:

Attachment 240862 Attachment 240863 Attachment 240864

(You'll also notice that no Activision game ever had "the lines." The programmers there were absolutely fanatical about that.)

Since the timing of the horizontal and vertical intervals is an absolute, dictated by the NTSC television standard, there's just no getting around it. The timing of the deflection coils is fixed in stone, and they dictated everything else in the system. When it came time for the beam to turn on and actually start drawing a line on the screen, the CPU had to be done with everything else and ready for it come hell or high water. Hence the term "Racing the Beam" as used in the title of the book I mentioned earlier.

Joe Perez 07-20-2011 10:19 AM

4 Attachment(s)
I wonder if you portable console enviers are familiar with the GP32, and its derivative, the GP2X?

Attachment 240855

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...px-GP2X_01.JPG


These are a rather interesting family of open-source handheld videogame systems. And while there are some games that have been coded directly for them, and numerous popular game engines have been ported to them, their most popular applications are emulators. With all of the different EMUs which are available for them, you can run just about any classic videogame ever written. MAME is available, for starters, as is just about every console and home computer ever created up through the mid 90s.


You can emulate the Atari 2600, the C64/128, the Amiga, the Genesis, the NES, the Apple II, the original Playstation, a PC running DOS, and dozens more. Here's a list taken from the DeveloperWiki:



Acorn
  • Archimedes
  • BBC Micro
Amstrad
  • CPC
Apple
  • Apple ][
  • Macintosh
Arcade
  • CPS2
  • MAME
  • MC68000/Z80
Atari
  • 130XE
  • 800/800XL
  • 2600
  • 5200
  • 7800
  • Jaguar
  • Lynx
  • ST
Bandai
  • Wonderswan
Coleco
  • Adam
  • ColecoVision
Commodore
  • Amiga
  • Plus/4
  • C64
  • C128
  • CBM-II
  • PET
  • VIC-20
GCE
  • Vectrex
IBM
  • PC
Magnavox
  • Odyssey 2
Mattel
  • Intellivision
  • MGT/SAM/WCC
  • SAM Coupé
NEC
  • PC-98
  • PC Engine
Nintendo
  • GameBoy (and GameBoy Color)
  • GameBoy Advance
  • NES
  • SNES
Sinclair
  • ZX Spectrum
Sega
  • Game Gear
  • Master System
  • Mega CD
  • Mega Drive
SNK
  • Neo Geo
  • Neo Geo CD
  • Neo Geo Pocket
Sony
  • MSX
  • PlayStation
Tandy
  • Color Computer (aka. Radio Shack TRS-80)
Texas Instruments
  • 99/4A
  • TI-92
Thomson
  • TO7-70
Watara
  • Supervision
Other
  • Chip8
  • EDSAC
  • J2ME

(Did you catch the second-to-last one in the list? This fucker can emulate the EDSAC! The very first stored-program, general-purpose computer ever greated! Read about it here.)


The company that originally made them is sort of bankrupt-ish, however the hardware still seems to be available, as it appears that another company has taken over production:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/bfc7/

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/e5ef/

Attachment 240856

Attachment 240857

Attachment 240858

Braineack 07-20-2011 11:05 AM

smart phone + emulator = you all fail.

Joe Perez 07-20-2011 11:13 AM


Originally Posted by Braineack (Post 751181)
smart phone + emulator = you all fail.

Touchscreen (or tiny keyboard, or crackberry-style trackball / touchpad) on smartphone + videogame designed for joystick input = hellafail.

I've tried it. Even Super Mario Brothers is utterly unplayable. I don't even know why the guy bothered to port it. Shoving shards of broken glass up his asshole would have been more productive.

tasty danish 07-20-2011 02:19 PM

^this. I was all excited when I saw EMU's for my phone. Touchscreen control SUCKS.

Braineack 07-20-2011 02:38 PM

I played FF3 on my phone. I have a real key pad, but i agree not as good as a real game pad.

shuiend 07-20-2011 02:53 PM

Can you get a ps3 controller to pair over bluetooth to an android device?

Joe Perez 07-20-2011 02:53 PM

1 Attachment(s)

Originally Posted by Braineack (Post 751254)
I played FF3 on my phone. I have a real key pad, but i agree not as good as a real game pad.

I'd be curious to know which phone you use.

This is mine:

Attachment 240854

From what I have seen, I have a better keyboard than about 90% of smartphone users. And for gaming, it's not even one-fourtieth as user-friendly as an actual D-pad. (Or even a gerbil-penis, for that matter.)

Realistically speaking, the majority of non-hackberry smartphones (including what is considered by many to be "The" smartphone) do not have keyboards at all.






Originally Posted by shuiend (Post 751257)
Can you get a ps3 controller to pair over bluetooth to an android device?

Might be interesting to try. The application would need to support it, though.

Kind of defeats the whole "portability" thing, too, if I need two hands to hold and operate the joystick, and a third hand to hold the phone. Granted, you and I have never met in person, so your anatomy may differ from mine.

Braineack 07-20-2011 02:58 PM

this is my phone:

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/...d-at-299-2.jpg

I'm almost positive I've heard of bluetooth game cube controllers working with it.

tasty danish 07-20-2011 04:24 PM

I tried to bluetooth a PS3 controller to my PC and it was a nightmare. I gave up, though my phone has a kick-stand so the idea would work.

Joe Perez 07-20-2011 06:25 PM

1 Attachment(s)
This is getting interestinger and interestinger....


I have no interest in lugging around a PS3 joystick so that I can run emulators that don't exist on my phone with crappy battery life.

On the other hand, the GP2x "Cannoo" (the latest version, built by a company that actually exists) seems to garner high praise:

Attachment 240851


And then I stumbled across the Pandora:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ndoraFront.JPG

Now, on the one hand, it's slightly too large to be called a handheld game.

On the other hand, it's an actual computer.

Joe Perez 07-20-2011 09:48 PM


Originally Posted by Cococarbine (Post 750732)
(Pong video)

Just got around to watching that.

Seriously funny shit. :D

1redcanuck 07-21-2011 05:39 PM

I use a Nintendo Wii remote to play NES and Genesis emulators on my iPhone. Works pretty well. Small enough to carry around with you if you wanted to as well.


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